At 5 p.m. on Monday, Hurricane Sandy was 40 miles off the coast of Atlantic City, where winds had already gusted to 77 mph.

But on the lengthy list of active weather warnings for the city at the time, one was conspicuously missing. A hurricane warning was never issued for Atlantic City, where Sandy made landfall some hours later, or anywhere on the New Jersey coast for that matter, leading to a storm of criticism from private meteorologists nationwide that stands as the sole blemish on an otherwise flawless forecast.

"We don’t see any justification," said Barry Lee Myers, chief executive of Accuweather, for the lack of a warning. "The concern is we don’t know what kind of negative impact that might have had on people."

The National Hurricane Center, in a statement, said it made the decision to discontinue hurricane warnings because Sandy was forecast to — and did, in their eyes — lose its tropical characteristics.

The National Weather Service division reclassified Sandy as a post-tropical cyclone, not a hurricane.

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"By using non-tropical warnings in these areas from the start, we avoid or minimize the significant confusion that could occur if the warning suite changed from tropical to non-tropical in the middle of the event," the statement said.

But Myers and others, like Steven DiMartino of Freehold-based NY NJ PA Weather, argue the opposite — that communities wouldn’t necessarily know to expect hurricane conditions, though Sandy made landfall with the strength of a category 1 hurricane.

"I hope we’re going to see some investigation into the National Hurricane Center and why this decision was made," DiMartino said. "It doesn’t make any sense."

Whether Sandy was technically a hurricane or not, and warranted such warnings, could also have a serious impact on the insurance industry and be a boon for storm-ravaged residents.

The state’s department of Banking and Insurance ruled Tuesday night that insurers would not be able to charge a "hurricane deductible" on damage claims arising out of Sandy.

David Robinson, state climatologist at Rutgers University, said the issue will likely be raised when the National Hurricane Center reviews its forecast, which he said was otherwise brilliant, in the coming months.

"It is a question that has to be raised," Robinson said. "In retrospect they probably should have issued hurricane warnings up to Montauk in Long Island. They didn’t want to confuse the heck out of people. Well, what confusion did they cause by doing this?"